The Eldest Brother is Handsome but Sick. - Chapter 2

Selling a half-grown Su Huai to a human trafficker for ten taels of silver.

Yan Jin leaned against the desk, head bowed, his expression unreadable. If he had to name the one thing he could never forget in his twenty-one years of life, it was undoubtedly this. Because, He took a deep breath, his mouth twitching, until finally, bolstered by the sharp pain in his side, he slammed his hand on the desk in an outburst of indignation. “It’s been six months! I’ve been explaining this for six months! Did I sell him? He was the one who insisted on following those people for half a bag of chestnut candies!”

“The kid was just a tiny tot, but his little legs moved like lightning! I couldn’t even catch up!” Yan Jin gestured wildly with his arms, his voice growing more aggrieved by the second as he beat his chest and stomped his feet. “I dragged my sickly body around for a whole year before I finally dug him out of a wolf’s den, and yet he has the nerve to complain about the ‘damp conditions’ of his original home?”

“Oh, Heavens, look down and judge between the loyal and the treacherous! I am innocent!”

This matter dated back four years.

On a late autumn evening, as twilight dimmed, a fierce wind howled through the streets, sweeping up withered branches and fallen leaves. A small dog frolicked after the swirling leaves, chasing them all the way to the clinic’s entrance before squeezing through a familiar gap in the broken door.

At that time, Sansheng Hall was called a medical clinic, but it looked more like a dilapidated courtyard. Half of the walls had collapsed, weeds and wild trees grew toward the sky, and even the eaves had been recently patched the clash of new and old materials splitting the building into two distinct halves. Only the plaque, bearing the words “Sansheng Hall” in bold calligraphy, hung straight and true.

Inside the main hall, a still-youthful Yan Jin listened to a subordinate’s report while checking the accounts with an abacus. Half an hour later, he took a deep breath, closed the ledger, and his face wrinkled like a discarded rag. “How did we get this poor?”

The poverty of Sansheng Hall could be traced back to its “eccentric” lineage. The Sect Master, Yin Zhushuang, was chronically drunk. Of her two disciples, one clamored to wander the martial world (Jianghu), while the other spent her days self-indulgently chasing “wind, flowers, and the moon.”

One day, the trio stared into their empty coin purses and reached a collective conclusion: they needed an Eldest Senior Brother who was wealthy and, more importantly, knew how to make money.

And so, Yan Jin became the designated sucker.

However, the hastily appointed Senior Brother was a naturally frail invalid. He couldn’t lift anything, couldn’t carry anything, and trembled after walking two paces let alone toil to earn money. The trio fell into despair; Yan Jin, looking at the gray, broken courtyard, felt even more hopeless.

They scraped by for six months until they could finally put food on the table…

“The priority now is to make a name for Sansheng Hall. Ideally, through free clinics ” Yan Jin closed the ledger, only to look up and find his subordinates long gone. The only one left was his second junior sister, Xia Qingyan, who was currently contemplating her twentieth attempt to start her life as a wandering hero.

Xia Qingyan sat on a wooden stool, her shoulders hunched and her head bowed so low it nearly touched the floor. Her hands were clenched in her lap, her anxiety palpable. She opened her mouth to speak, but the moment she met Yan Jin’s gaze, she looked away in terror. Finally, under Yan Jin’s concerned watch, she forced a stiff, dead smile and fled in a panic.

This “heroine” who yearned for the wild Jianghu was, in reality, a victim of severe social anxiety.

“…” Yan Jin picked up the whimpering puppy at his feet and smiled. “System, I quit. Let some other bastards do it.”

Thus, on that day, the people once again remembered the terror of poverty. The exploited Senior Brother, shouting about “dreams” and “bonds,” truly did go off to travel the world.

He first met Su Huai at the end of the following spring. After waking up to find the begonia blossoms covering the ground in front of the Su family clinic, Su Huai grabbed a broom to sweep. He looked up and saw someone sitting on the courtyard wall.

At first, he could only see a pair of long, elegant legs. Then, the person peeked out from behind the sea of begonia flowers. He was smiling, dressed in a pink-and-white robe, looking exactly like a flower spirit from a picture book.

Su Huai’s breath hitched. He didn’t dare look again, instead staring at his broom. “Who are you?” he asked, his voice soft.

The voice was childish; Yan Jin realized this was a genuine young boy. He turned his head to cough a few times, leaning back as if exhausted, before teasing in a melodic drawl, “I am Yan Jin, a spirit born from these begonias. I specialize in eating the children who live here.”

He propped a leg up, resting his elbow on his knee. “I’ve been waiting for someone to open the door, but since no one did, I was planning to climb over and start my meal.”

Truly, Yan Jin’s mouth never had a filter. Unfortunately, karma arrived swiftly his foot slipped, he lost his balance, and he tumbled straight off the wall, using Su Huai as a human cushion.

“Hey, get up—” Su Huai started to push the person off, but then he realized something was wrong. The man’s breath was scorching.

The “spring flush” on this person’s face was actually a raging fever!

Their first meeting was a scare, and for the next two years, the first thing Su Huai did whenever he saw Yan Jin was check his pulse.

Like now: Yan Jin held a soup spoon in one hand, while the other was pinned down by Su Huai. Beside him, a small white dog named Little White Plum was gnawing on a roast chicken. Further away, a pot of soup bubbled noisily next to some freshly sliced radishes.

“The dog gets roast chicken and I get radishes? My life is worse than a dog’s, I’m not dying yet, ancestor. If you don’t let go, the soup will boil dry,” Yan Jin said, half-laughing as he wiggled his wrist. “Go help me add some incense to the burner; I’m busy.”

“Your illness has never truly gone away. I don’t know why you don’t use the silver I give you to buy decent food to nourish your body. Does hoarding it make it grow?” Su Huai grumbled, though he obediently moved to the incense burner. “Cooking while burning incense such ‘refined’ tastes for someone so poor.”

Suddenly, Su Huai’s nose twitched. He slapped his forehead and shouted in exasperation, “Yan Jin! What kind of demonic concoction are you boiling now? You are not allowed to eat that; do you hear me? Last time you had diarrhea, it nearly killed you!”

“Woof! Woof!” Little White Plum chimed in, startling a few sparrows into flight, their wings shaking snow from the branches.

Yan Jin looked at the unidentified object in the pot, dropped his spoon, and grabbed an umbrella. Su Huai quickly snatched up a cloak. “It’s freezing out. Where are you going now?”

“Yan Jin!” the boy called out urgently. As Yan Jin turned, Su Huai wrapped the cloak tightly around him and blew a breath of warm air onto his own hands. “In these two years, you’ve been gravely ill many times, yet no one ever came looking for you. You have no one to rely on, why don’t you stay with me from now on? I’ll treat you as my older brother.”

The teenager was shooting up like a bamboo sprout after rain; he was already nearly as tall as Yan Jin. Yan Jin tilted his umbrella to look Su Huai in the eye. The boy’s gaze was sincere and bright, reflecting the light of the snow.

Yan Jin’s heart stirred, but he didn’t agree. Instead, he softened his voice and complained, “It’s dinner time, and you won’t let me eat the soup I made.”

“So?”

Yan Jin smiled slightly and turned to walk away. “So, I’m going to your house to mooch a meal.”

The accident happened within the month. Yan Jin and Su Huai went to a neighboring town for supplies but were caught in a blizzard on their return. They barely managed to escape with their lives, stumbling into a small village.

It was then that Yan Jin fell ill.

In winter, it wasn’t just wolves searching for food; there were also bandits. In recent years of war, bandits had become cunning, often using children to gain sympathy before invading a village. The locals avoided them like the plague.

“Hey, kid.” Outside a dilapidated straw hut, a man appeared out of nowhere. He bent over and beckoned to Su Huai. “I have some chestnut candies here. Want some?”

Bandits and wolves weren’t the only winter dangers; there were also human traffickers.

Chestnut candies shouldn’t have existed in such a destitute village, but to Su Huai, it was a chance. He clenched his fists, looked at the unconscious, feverish Yan Jin, and stood up. “I don’t want candies. I want a shelter from the wind, warm water, and medicine.”

The trafficker finally noticed someone lying deep inside the hut. His eyes lit up, and he rubbed his hands together, stepping inside. Suddenly, a wooden staff whistled through the air, aimed straight at his head. He scrambled backward to avoid it.

Su Huai gripped the staff with both hands, standing in front of Yan Jin. “Don’t come near him!” he hissed.

His gaze was ferocious. Fearing his prize would slip away, the trafficker rolled his eyes and smiled ingratiatingly. “I won’t go over, I’m just looking. Calm down! You want to save him, right? Leave it to me!”

Su Huai lowered the staff slightly but remained wary. “How?”

“Easy. My carriage is nearby. Let’s move him there.”

Su Huai looked at Yan Jin again. “No, he can’t handle the wind.”

“Then I’ll bring the carriage here. But the horse is high-strung; I can’t do it alone. You have to help.” The trafficker watched Su Huai’s expression and pulled ten taels of silver from his robes, placing them on the ground. “See? My money is right here. I’m not going anywhere.”

The muffled voices in the hut soon turned into the sound of two sets of footsteps one heavy, one light. Yan Jin opened his eyes in a daze; the sky outside was pitch black. Su Huai was following someone away.

His head throbbed painfully, but some dormant instinct kicked in as he recalled the word “chestnut candies” from the conversation.

Traffickers!

He broke into a cold sweat and struggled to his feet to give chase. The moment he stepped out of the hut, he collapsed into a snowbank. When he looked up again, the man and the boy were gone.

“System, System” Yan Jin knelt in the snow, clawing at the jagged ice as he crawled forward. He swallowed the metallic taste of blood in his throat, his eyes red. “System, save me one more time. I can’t die yet.”

He exhaled; his voice nearly lost to the howling gale. “I have to bring him back. He, he called me his brother.”

“Oh? And then what?”

The train of thought was abruptly severed by the sound of seeds cracking and a familiar line of dialogue. Inside his head, the System was eating melon seeds while watching a drama. “You’ve reminisced about this a thousand times already.”

“I even used this backstory as a template for a novel called Broken Mirror Rejoined: The Heartless Junior Brother’s Crematorium of Regret. It’s a hit in the System world. Want to read it?”

Yan Jin rubbed his sore waist, preoccupied with his own worries. “I don’t know what that trafficker said to him to brainwash him so successfully. Do you think we can still coexist peacefully? What if he runs away again?”

The System went silent, and that familiar TV line played again: “Your servant simply cannot do it!”

Yan Jin: “…”

He sat in silence for a moment, then suddenly began rummaging through his drawers until he pulled a crumpled indenture contract from a dusty corner!

The System shrieked, [Wait, no! Stop! That’s…]

But Master Yan, having been an Eldest Senior Brother for years, was a man of action. He didn’t hear the System’s warning. He kicked open Su Huai’s door and slammed the contract onto the table.

“Sign it!”

Faced with Yan Jin’s sudden bout of insanity, Su Huai remained as steady as a mountain. He didn’t even glance at the crooked door hanging off its hinges. In fact, the moment Yan Jin entered, Su Huai’s expression had actually softened into something quite pleasant.

He picked up the paper, but before he could read the fine print, his eyes fell upon the signature at the bottom.

In an instant, the warmth in his eyes turned to ice. He looked at Yan Jin, his voice trembling with suppressed rage. “You really want me to sign this?”

What kind of question is that? I brought it here, didn’t I?

Yan Jin nodded firmly. “Of course!”

“Heh.” Su Huai stood up abruptly. He had grown fast and was now half a head taller than Yan Jin; looking down at him, he carried an overwhelming sense of pressure. “Yan Jin, there is no one in this world more of a bastard than you!”

With that, Su Huai stormed out, slamming the door so hard the remaining half of the frame groaned.

Only then did the System find the chance to finish its sentence: […That’s the indenture contract your Third Junior Brother brought back… from a brothel.]

“…………”

Silence was the bridge to the afterlife tonight. Yan Jin felt he could just go ahead and die.

The kid is even harder to coax now! What do I do?! Waiting online! Very urgent!